Saturday, April 14, 2007

Ever wanted to share your digital photos with friends and family, but find it too time consuming and clumsy emailing them? Are you worried about loosing your photos if your computer hard disk fails?

Picasa Web Albums is the answer.

You create a free account which gives you one Gigabyte of on-line storage. This enables you to upload your photos into on-line albums. These albums can be public, so that anyone can search and view them, or private so that only people that you send the web link to can view that particular album. This is much quicker and easier than trying to email those photos to friends.In addition as a bonus you now have a separate copy of your photos stored by google as a backup of your photos in case your hard disk fails.

The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) has welcomed the announcement that trading standards officers will be given new powers to check businesses’ compliance with software licensing laws from 6 April. The new powers will be granted under an amendment to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The move was a key recommendation in the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property. It’ll mean more surprise raids, and more prosecutions of those who flaunt the regulations.

“It’s time for organisations to get their software compliance with the law addressed. Trading Standards can now come knocking on your door, and you may be the subject of a criminal investigation. Very simply the risk to organisations which misuse software will be greatly increased, and therefore compliance is absolutely essential”.

If you are the owner of a business that is using illegal software you are risking a large fine and / or a prison sentence.